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dam-l (Part 2 of 2) ..Anti-China Trade Campaign
--
Dangerous Liaisons: Progressives, the Right, and the
Anti-China Trade Campaign
By Walden Bello and Anuradha Mittal*
Institute for Food and Development Policy
May 2000
[ cont'd... Part 2 of 2 ]
The Anti-China Trade Campaign: Wrong and Dangerous
It is against this complex backdrop of a country struggling for
development under a political system, which, while not democratic along
Western lines, is nevertheless legitimate, and which realizes that its
continuing legitimacy depends on its ability to deliver economic growth
that one must view the recent debate in the US over the granting of
Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) to China.
PNTR is the standard tariff treatment that the United States gives
nearly all its trading partners, with the exception of China,
Afghanistan, Serbia-Montenegro, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.
Granting of PNTR is seen as a key step in China's full accession to the
World Trade Organization (WTO) since the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement
establishing the WTO requires members to extend NTR to other WTO members
mutually and without conditions. This is the reason that the fight over
PNTR is so significant, in that it is integrally linked to China's full
accession to the WTO.
Organized labor is at the center of a motley coalition that is against
granting PNTR to China. This coalition includes right wing groups and
personalities like Pat Buchanan, the old anti-China lobby linked to the
anti-communist Kuomintang Party in Taiwan, protectionist US business
groups, and some environmentalist, human rights, and citizens' rights
groups. The intention of this right-left coalition is to be able to use
trade sanctions to influence China's economic and political behavior as
well as to make it difficult for China to enter the WTO.
There are fundamental problems with the position of this alliance,
many of whose members are, without doubt, acting out of the best intentions.
First of all, the anti-China trade campaign is essentially another
manifestation of American unilateralism. Like many in the anti-PNTR
coalition, we do not uphold the free-trade paradigm that underpins the
NTR. Like many of them, we do not think that China will benefit from
WTO membership. But what is at issue here is not the desirability or
non-desirability of the free trade paradigm and the WTO in advancing
people's welfare. What is at issue here is Washington's unilateral
moves to determine who is to be a legitimate member of the international
economic community--in this case, who is qualified to join and enjoy
full membership rights in the WTO.
This decision of whether or not China can join the WTO is one that
must be determined by China and the 137 member-countries of the WTO, without
one power exercising effective veto power over this process. To subject
this process to a special bilateral agreement with the United States
that is highly conditional on the acceding country's future behavior
falls smack into the tradition of unilateralism.
One reason the anti-China trade campaign is particularly disturbing is
that it comes on the heels of a series of recent unilateralist acts, the
most prominent of which have been Washington's cruise missile attacks on
alleged terrorist targets in the Sudan and Afghanistan in August 1998,
its bombing of Iraq in December 1998, and the US-instigated 12-week NATO
bombardment of Kosovo in 1999. In all three cases, the US refused to
seek UN sanction or approval but chose to act without international
legal restraints. Serving as the gatekeeper for China's integration
into the global economic community is the economic correlate of
Washington's military unilateralism.
Second, the anti-China trade campaign reeks of double standards. A
great number of countries would be deprived of PNTR status were the same
standards sought from China applied to them, including Singapore (where
government controls the labor movement), Mexico (where labor is also
under the thumb of government), Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (where
women are systematically relegated by law and custom to second-class
status as citizens), Pakistan (where a military dictatorship reigns),
Brunei (where democratic rights are non-existent), to name just a few US
allies. What is the logic and moral basis for singling out China when
there are scores of other regimes that are, in fact, so much more
insensitive to the political, economic, and social needs of their
citizenries?
Third, the campaign is marked by what the great Senator J. William
Fulbright denounced as the dark side of the American spirit that led to
the Vietnam debacle--that is, "the morality of absolute self-assurance
fired by the crusading spirit."10 It draws emotional energy not so much
from genuine concerns for human and democratic rights in China but from
the knee-jerk emotional ensemble of anti-communism that continues to
plague the US public despite the end of the Cold War. When one
progressive organizer says that non-passage of the PNTR would inflict
defeat on "the brutal, arrogant, corrupt, autocratic, and oligarchic
regime in Beijing," the strong language is not unintentional: it is
meant to hit the old Cold War buttons to mobilize the old
anti-communist, conservative constituency, in the hope of building a
right-left populist base that could--somehow--be directed at
"progressive" ends.
Fourth, the anti-China trade campaign is intensely hypocritical. As
many critics of the campaign have pointed out, the moral right of the US
to deny permanent normal trading rights to China on social and
environmental grounds is simply nonexistent given its record: the
largest prison population in the world, the most state-sponsored
executions of any country in the world, the highest income disparities
among industrialized countries, the world's biggest emitter of
greenhouse gases, and quasi-slavery conditions for farm workers.11
Fifth, the anti-China trade campaign is intellectually flawed. The
issue of labor control in China lies at the core of the campaign, which
blames China's government for the low wages that produce the very
competitively priced goods that are said to contribute to displacing US
industries and workers. This is plain wrong: the relatively low wages
in China stem less from wage repression than from the dynamics of
economic development. Widespread poverty or low economic growth are the
main reasons for the low wages in developing countries. Were the state
of unionism the central determinant of wage levels, as the AFL-CIO
claims, labor costs in authoritarian China and democratic India, with
its formally free trade union movement, would not be equal, as they, in
fact, are.
Similarly, it is mainly the process of economic growth--the dynamic
interaction between the growing productivity of labor, the reduction of
the wage-depressing surplus of rural labor, and rising profits--that
triggers the rapid rise in wage levels in an economy, as shown in the
case of Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore, which had no independent unions
and where strikes were illegal during their periods of rapid
development.12
Saying that the dynamics of development rather than the state of labor
organizing is by far the greatest determinant of wage levels is not to
say that the organization of labor is inconsequential. Successful
organizing has gotten workers a higher level of wages than would be
possible were it only the dynamics of economic development that were at
work. It is not to argue that labor organizing is not desirable in
developing economies. Of course, it is not only desirable but
necessary, so that workers can keep more of the value of production for
themselves, reduce their exploitation by transnational and state
capitalist elites, and gain more control over their conditions of work.
Sixth, the anti-China trade campaign is dishonest. It invokes concern
about the rights of Chinese workers and the rights of the Chinese
people, but its main objective is to protect American jobs against cheap
imports from China. This is cloaking self-interest with altruistic
rhetoric. What the campaign should be doing is openly acknowledging
that its overriding goal is to protect jobs, which is a legitimate
concern and goal. And what it should be working for is not invoking
sanctions on human rights grounds, but working out solutions such as
managed trade, which would seek to balance the need of American workers
to protect their jobs while allowing the market access that allows
workers in other countries to keep their jobs and their countries to
sustain a certain level of growth while they move to change their
development model.13
Instead, what the rhetoric of the anti-China trade campaign does is to
debase human rights and democratic rights language with its hypocrisy
while delegitimizing the objective of protecting jobs--which is a
central social and economic right--by concealing it.
Seventh, the anti-China trade campaign is a classic case of
blaming the victim. China is not the enemy. Indeed, it is a prisoner of a
global
system of rules and institutions that allows transnational corporations
to take advantage of the differential wage levels of counties at
different levels of development to increase their profits, destabilize
the global environment by generalizing an export-oriented,
high-consumption model of development, and concentrate global income in
fewer and fewer hands.
Not granting China PNTR will not affect the functioning of this global
system. Not giving China normal trading and investment rights will not
harm transnational corporations; they will simply take more seriously
the option of moving to Indonesia, Mauritius, or Mexico, where their
ability to exact concessions is greater than in China, which can stand
up to foreign interests far better than the weak governments of these
countries.
What the AFL-CIO and others should be doing is targeting this global
system, instead of serving up China as a proxy for it.
A Positive Agenda
The anti-China trade campaign amounts to a Faustian bargain that seeks
to buy some space for US organized labor at the expense of real
solidarity with workers and progressive worker and environmental
movements globally against transnational capital. But by buying into
the traditional US imperial response of unilateralism, it will end up
eventually eroding the position of progressive labor, environmental, and
civil society movements both in the US and throughout the world.
What organized labor and US NGO's should be doing, instead, is
articulating a positive agenda aimed at weakening the power of global
corporations and multilateral agencies that promote TNC-led
globalization.
The first order of business is to not allow the progressive
movement to be sandbagged in the pro-permanent normal trade relations,
anti-permanent normal trade relations terms of engagement that now
frames the debate. While progressives must, for the time being, oppose
the more dangerous threat posed by the unilateralists, they should be
developing a position on global economic relations that avoids both the
free trade paradigm that underlies the PNTR and the unilateralist
paradigm of the anti-PNTR forces. The model we propose is managed
trade, which allows trading partners to negotiate bilateral and
multilateral treaties that address central issues in their
relationship--among them, the need to preserve workers jobs in the US
with the developing countries' need for market access.
Advocacy of managed trade must, however, be part of a broader campaign
for progressive global economic governance. The strategic aim of such a
campaign must be the tighter regulation, if not replacement, of the
model corporate-led free market development that seeks to do away with
social and state restrictions on the mobility of capital at the expense
of labor. In its place must be established a system of genuine
international cooperation and looser global economic integration that
allows countries to follow paths of national and regional development
that make the domestic market and regional markets rather than the
global market the engine of growth, development, and job creation.
This means support for measures of asset and income redistribution
that would create the purchasing power that will make domestic markets
viable. It means support for trade measures and capital controls that
will give countries more control over their trade and finance so that
commodity and capital flows become less disruptive and destabilizing.
It means support for regional integration or regional economic union
among the developing countries as an alternative to indiscriminate
globalization.
A key element in this campaign for a new global economic governance is
the abolition of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and
the World Trade Organization that serve as the pillars of the system of
corporate-led globalization and their replacement with a pluralistic
system of institutions that complement but at the same time check and
balance one another, thus giving the developing countries the space to
pursue their paths to development.
The IMF, World Bank, and WTO are currently experiencing a severe
crisis of legitimacy, following the debacle in Seattle, the April protests in
Washington, and the release of the report of the International Financial
Institutions Advisory Commission (Meltzer Commission) appointed by the
US Congress, which recommends the radical downsizing or transformation
of the Bank and Fund.14 Now is the time for the progressive movement to
take the offensive and push for the elimination or radical
transformation of these institutions. Yet, here we are, being waylaid
from this critical task at this key moment by an all-advised, divisive
campaign to isolate the wrong enemy!
Another key thrust of a positive agenda is a coordinated drive by
civil society groups in the North and the South to pressure the US, China, and
all other governments to ratify and implement all conventions of the
International Labor Organization (ILO) and give the ILO more effective
authority to monitor, supervise, and adjudicate implementation of these
conventions. This campaign must be part of a broader effort to support
the formation of genuine labor unions in China, the Southern United
States, and elsewhere in a spirit of real workers' solidarity. This,
instead of relying on government trade sanctions that are really
self-serving rather than meant to support Third World workers, is the
route to the creation of really firm ties of solidarity across
North-South lines.
This social and economic program must be tied to a strategy for
protecting the global environment that also eschews sanctions as an
approach and puts the emphasis on promoting sustainable development
models in place of the export-led, high-consumption development model;
pushes the adoption of common environmental codes that prevent
transnational firms from pitting one country against another in their
search for the zero cost environmental regimes; and promotes an
environmental Marshall Plan aimed at transferring appropriate green
process and production technologies to China and other developing
countries.
Above all, this approach must focus not on attacking China and the
South but on strategically changing the production and consumption
behavior and levels in the North that are by far the biggest source of
environmental destabilization.
Finally, a positive agenda must have as a central element civil
society groups in the North working constructively with people's movements in
China, the United States, and other countries experiencing democratic
deficits to support the expansion of democratic space. While the
campaign must be uncompromising in denouncing acts of repression like
the Tienanmen Square massacre and Washington's use of mass incarceration
as a tool of social control, it must avoid imposing the forms of Western
procedural democracy on others and hew to the principle that it is the
people in these countries themselves that must take the lead in building
democracy according to their rhythm, traditions, and cultures.
Abandoning Unilateralism
The anti-PNTR coalition is an alliance born of opportunism. In its
effort to block imports from China, the AFL-CIO is courting the more
conservative sectors of the US population, including the Buchananite
right wing, by stirring the old Cold War rhetoric. Nothing could be a
more repellent image of this sordid project than John Sweeney, James
Hoffa, President of the Teamsters, and Pat Buchanan holding hands in the
anti-China trade rally on April 12, 2000, with Buchanan promising to
make Hoffa his top negotiator of trade, if he won the race for
president.
Some environmental groups and citizens groups which have long but
unsuccessfully courted labor, have, in turn, endorsed the campaign
because they see it as the perfect opportunity to build bridges to the
AFL-CIO. What we have, as a result, is an alliance built on the
assertion of US unilateralism rather than on the cornerstone of
fundamental shared goals of solidarity, equity, and environmental
integrity.
This is not a progressive alliance but a right-wing populist alliance
in the tradition of the anti-communist Big Government-Big Capital-Big
Labor alliance during the Cold War, the labor-capital alliance in the
West that produced the Exclusion and Ant-Miscegenation Acts against
Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workers in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and, more recently, the populist movement that has supported
the tightening of racist immigration laws by emphasizing the divide
between workers who are citizens and workers who are not, with the
latter being deprived of basic political rights.
It is a policy that will, moreover, feed global instability by lending
support to the efforts of the US right and the Pentagon to demonize
China as The Enemy and resurrect Containment as America's Grand
Strategy, this time with China instead of the Soviet Union as the foe in
a paradigm designed to advance American strategic hegemony.
As in every other instance of unprincipled unity between the right and
some sectors of the progressive movement, progressives will find that it
will be the right that will walk away with the movement while they will
be left with not even their principles.
It is time to move away from this terribly misguided effort to derail
the progressive movement by demonizing China, and to bring us all back
to the spirit of Seattle as a movement of citizens of the world against
corporate-led globalization and for genuine international cooperation.
*Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South, a
program of research, analysis, and capacity building based in Bangkok;
Anuradha Mittal is co-director of the Oakland-based Institute for Food
and Development Policy, better known as Food First. We would like to
thank Nicola Bullard, Peter Rosset, and Sal Glynn for their invaluable
advice and assistance.
Footnotes:
1. Quoted in John Gershman, "How to Debate the China Issue without China
Bashing," Progressive Response, Vol. 4, No. 17, April 20, 2000.
2. Lester Brown, Who Will Feed China? (New York: Norton, 1995).
3. Anil Agarwal, Sunita Narain, and Anju Sharma, eds., Green Politics
(New Delhi: Center for Science and Environment, 2000), p. 108.
4. Ibid., p. 16.
5. FAO and IMPACT data cited in Simeon Ehui, "Trade and Food Systems in
the Developing World," Presentation at Salzburg Seminar, Salzburg,
Austria, May 11, 2000.
6. Amnesty International, Unted States of America: Rights for All
(London: amnesty International Publications, 1998).
7. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar,
Straus Giroux, 1999), p. 50.
8. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American
Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), p. 50.
9John Gray, False Dawn (New York: New Press, 1998), pp. 189-190.
10. J. William Fulbright, quoted in Walter McDougall, Promised Land,
Crusader State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 206.
11. See Anuradha Mittal and Peter Rosset, "The Real Enemy is the WTO,
not China," Peaceworks, March 1, 2000; and Jim Smith, "The China
Syndrome--or, How to Hijack a Movement," LA Labor News, Aprl 2, 2000.
12. For the state of the labor movement in these societies in the period
of rapid growth, see Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in
Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (San Francisco: Institute
for Food and Development Policy, 1990).
13. For more on managed trade, see, among others, Johnson, p. 174.
14. Report of the US Congressional International Financial Institution
Advisory Commission (Washington: DC, US Congress, Feb. 2000).
For the full article, visit the Food First website at:
http://www.foodfirst.org/media/opeds/2000/5-china.html
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